Building a New Podcast, Part 3: Antiperformativity

Thanks for running with my idea! As usual, your arguments are more poetic than mine, though some of what you write is too ephemeral for me to grok – can you expand on the whole ‘charming chads chatting’ thing? I honestly haven’t listened to many podcasts, and would like to know what you think we need to avoid.

I do think one of the challenges will be to avoid being overly performative. This podcast will be edited for dead air and flubs, and thus not “total live uncut,” but it should be a genuine reflection of how we normally think and talk. This probably goes without saying, but people act differently when they know they’re being observed, and doubly so when they’re trying to sell something (or in this case, gain and retain an audience). Taken too far, I find this grating, and tend to tune out of any media that overtly plays to the crowd. Do we agree that this is something we need to keep an eye on and avoid as much as possible?

These larger questions of theme and integrity also don’t help us determine our actual content. In the previous letter, I suggested a few outlined area (current events and media), as well as JP-report backs. Are we good on all of those? Do we think we’ll have discrete sections, or just prepped material to talk about in an otherwise free-flowing conversation where I interrupt you a lot to argue with something you said? 1 Is each episode going to be themed in some way, or we will just let it naturally emerge from whatever we did and thought about in the prior month?

I know one thing we’re doing is making some lists and pitching them, because everyone likes lists! You told me about the one you were working on, but I already forgot what it was. Do you want to talk a bit about that process and other appealing things we might do?

As for titles: here’s what we’ve got so far:

“Just Podcast” (we both like this for its self-effacing simplicity and reference to JP, though it goes without saying that it’s singularly undiscoverable in the SEO sense)
“Dork and Stormy,” “Dork Souls,” “Edge of Dorkness,” etc. (This was a running joke during our January visit and of course it’s right up my pun-strewn alley, but it doesn’t tell people anything about what we do and might set up an unreasonable expectation for how many puns we’re gonna have!)“Klingon Sneeze” (from an early Next Generation episode – I like the title in and of itself, and the reference to doing things The Only Way You Know fits, but it’s probably way too inside baseball and will make people think it’s a Trek podcast)
“Nice Bathrobe” (nothing is better than a nice bathrobe!)
“Unnecessary Arguments” (self-explanatory)
“Dear Neighbors, Please Don’t Yell At The TV When I’m Recording a Podcast” (seriously the people in the TV can’t hear you)

That should give you more than enough to respond to! Let me know what you think,